If you are a regular visitor to our website, you may have noticed that lately we've reviewed quite a few HDTVs from Korean heavyweight electronic manufacturer Samsung. There's a perfectly valid reason for this: Samsung is making no secret of their desire to conquer the HD flat panel arena, and has lined up no less than six new ranges – encompassing both LCDs and plasmas – to hit the market from April 2007 onwards.

And consumers have lapped up these new offerings from Samsung like there's no tomorrow, largely due to competitive prices. But make no mistake, these inexpensive panels (relative to similar branded products in their respective classes) still manage to deliver admirable quality: the last two Samsung LCD TVs that we tested certainly impressed us enough to earn "Recommended" awards... and we do not give these out lightly.

But today is all about a new Samsung plasma, and a huge one at that. The Samsung PS50Q97HDX is part of the company's continued commmitment to its plasma TV division which briefly overtook Panasonic in US plasma unit sales during the first 2 weeks of March 2007. As the PS50Q97HDX sits imposingly in our test environment, we can't wait to see if it has what it takes to score a hat-trick (of "Recommended" awards) for Samsung...